On Being a Girl

A Review of ‘Angels and Tomboys,’ at the Newark Museum

GROWING UP “Lotus Lilies” (1888) by Charles Courtney Curran is in “Angels and Tomboys: Girlhood in 19th-Century American Art” at the Newark Museum.Credit
Terra Foundation for American Art

It is especially timely to see “Angels and Tomboys: Girlhood in 19th-Century American Art” at the Newark Museum after the recent election, in which women figured prominently. The exhibition covers a period when the female ancestors of today’s American women became popular subjects of artistic representation. Eighty paintings, prints, photographs and sculptures, along with excerpts from literary texts, also show how concepts of childhood — and particularly girlhood — underwent significant changes during the 19th century.

The exhibition is not explicitly political; most of the works look rather tame by today’s standards. And yet, many issues roil just under the surface, or would have been more apparent to contemporary viewers: the depiction of social and economic class, race and various forms of subjugation and exploitation. The impact of the Civil War registers in the later part of the show, reflecting changing education and labor conditions for women.

Photo

“Swinging on the Gate” (circa 1878-1879) by John George Brown.Credit
Taubman Museum of Art

The first text you see on the wall — which is also quoted in the catalog by the show’s organizer, Holly Pyne Connor, curator of 19th-century American art at the Newark Museum — borrows a line from Henry James’s novella “Daisy Miller” (1878), in which the character Daisy is described as an “inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence.” For Dr. Connor, those words also provide a basis for the angels and tomboys in the title.

The first images, though, are much less inscrutable. Ammi Phillips’s portraits of a “Boy in Red” and a “Girl in Pink,” both from around 1832, and Erastus Salisbury Field’s “Mrs. Paul Smith and Her Twins” (1835/1838) are from a period when parents dressed very young children in identical clothing and gender was readable only through certain markers in paintings: hair parted on the side for boys and in the middle for girls; boys carrying objects like hammers and girls wearing jewelry or carrying strawberries, which could represent either fecundity or talismans to ward off illness or evil spirits.

Innocence makes its appearance in the next gallery with Abbott Handerson Thayer’s “Angel” (1887), on loan from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and presented in a gold frame designed by the architect Stanford White. The painting depicts the artist’s daughter Mary as a white-winged figure — possibly, as the catalog suggests, a “purifying, angelic being” — or even an “angel of death,” since Thayer’s wife had recently been institutionalized for depression (in that era labeled “hysteria”) and died in 1891.

Photo

“Girl in a Red Dress” (circa 1835) by Ammi Phillips.Credit
Terra Foundation for American Art

The exhibition shifts into different terrain with works like Chase’s “Idle Hours,” from around 1894, which shows children lounging outside in the grass and points, if indirectly, to the ideas of 17th- and 18th-century thinkers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke, who formulated theories about childhood and the “natural” tendencies of children, which could be shaped by education. These ideas of the malleable child are bolstered by Winslow Homer’s painting of a girl “Reading by the Brook” (1879) and Edmund Charles Tarbell’s portrait of his daughters “Josephine and Mercie” (1908) reading and writing studiously inside on a bright summer day.

But the question of who is educated and who is consigned to hard labor is raised in vernacular images like Myron H. Kimball’s photograph “Emancipated Slaves Brought From Louisiana by Col. Geo. H. Hanks” (1863) and two 1890s photographs by Jacob Riis of poor urban girls, one a housecleaner and the other shown caring for an infant. Edward Lamson Henry’s “Kept In” (1889), shows a young, dark-skinned girl in a schoolhouse, kept inside for detention and with her book cast aside — an ambiguous image given that the education of African-Americans was prohibited in many states before the Civil War. Nearby is a painting by Lilly Martin Spencer, “War Spirit at Home (Celebrating the Victory at Vicksburg)” (1866), which suggests the fallout of the Civil War on the American family, with a disheveled interior and a nursing mother reading The New York Times, presumably with the names of the dead from the battle mentioned in the painting’s title.

Tomboys show up in the last third of the exhibition, and they come with their own model from American literature. If Daisy Miller exhibited the “audacity and innocence” of American girlhood, the character Jo from Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” (1868-69) serves, for Dr. Connor, as the archetype of the American tomboy.

Some of the key works here include John George Brown’s depiction of a young girl, “Swinging on the Gate,” from around 1878 to 1879, and Eastman Johnson’s “Kite Flying” (1865), as well as Homer’s woodcut “A Skating Scene” (1868). Another vernacular image, a Currier & Ives lithograph titled “Into Mischief,” from around 1857, shows a toddler wreaking havoc in a nursery — a rare image of a girl misbehaving, in a cultural landscape that included mischievous boys like Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer.

The sexual exploitation of children and its traumatic effects on them as adults, particularly women — which were studied by neurologists in Europe like Jean-Martin Charcot and his protégé, Sigmund Freud, and which were formulated as “hysteria” — are generally overlooked here. Seymour Joseph Guy’s painting “Making a Train” (1867), with a young girl playing dress-up in her bedroom, is about as close as the show gets to exploring the eroticism or sexualization of children.

But with many pieces on loan from institutions like the Smithsonian, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, “Angels and Tomboys” is built from the annals of American art, and it offers a portrait of American girlhood that is democratic, probing and, at this moment, oddly topical.

“Angels and Tomboys: Girlhood in 19th-Century American Art” is at the Newark Museum, 49 Washington Street, Newark, through Jan. 20. Information: (973) 596-6550 or newarkmuseum.org.